


Off-balance

by klose



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU - Comicverse, Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Afterglow, Intercrural Sex, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-04
Updated: 2013-04-04
Packaged: 2017-12-07 08:53:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/746641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/klose/pseuds/klose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brucie Wayne, playboy billionaire, is good with words. Batman doesn’t have need of them. And Bruce — can’t make sense of them most of the time, and certainly never when Dick is involved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Off-balance

**Author's Note:**

> For the kind anon @ tumblr who submitted some great prompt suggestions; I went with “afterglow”. Some inspiration was taken from the tags of [this NSFW post](http://silencingthedrums.tumblr.com/post/44378919757).

* * *

 

The rug in his study is of the finest sheepskin, soft and cream-coloured, and one of the countless embodiments of luxury that fill the vast rooms of Wayne Manor.  
  
Right then, however, it chafes somewhat, a rough surface lining the back of his sweat-soaked body from head to toe. Though the rug burn hardly matters, at least not while Bruce is caught up sucking deep, noisy breaths and trying to calm his heart. It’s a strange feeling, for someone like him. Batman regularly tackles giants and hordes of thugs in his daily excursions; he’s used to physical exertions, but this.  
  
_Sex._  
  
Sex with Dick in his study, of all places, before patrol, of all times —  
  
He isn’t even sure the door’s  _locked_.  
  
There certainly hadn’t been time for anything of that sort, not between him practically  _mauling_  Dick, ripping both of their clothes off before pinning that pliant body down to fuck the younger man almost through the floor.  
  
Bruce swallows hard, his eyes falling shut as if blocking out the ivory ceiling will block out the memory too. But with Dick warm and sticky and heaving right next to him, he can’t ignore — can’t forget —  
  
“Stop that.”  
  
And now Dick rolls over to drape himself over Bruce’s body, one long leg slinging over his waist. A hand, slightly slimmer than his, but just as calloused, pats his chest, a subtle nudge for Bruce to force his eyes open.  
  
When he acquiesces, it’s to the sight of Dick is gazing up at him, through eyes still darkened and heavy-lidded from the rush of their earlier encounter. His lean, naked form stretches out over Bruce’s, locks of tousled hair dripping beads of sweat into his blue eyes. Bruce can’t help reaching over to push the dark hair aside, before sliding his hand down to settle on Dick’s nape. The younger man is soft against him, and so very warm…  
  
Guilt surges through him, blistering and uncomfortable, and Bruce looks away to stare at a random spot just above the door.   
  
“I… attacked you,” he admits, after a considerable pause, the words falling out of his mouth in a low murmur.  
  
It’s a lengthy moment before Dick replies. “Yeah. Yeah, you totally did.”  
  
Bruce inhales sharply, a quick intake of breath, even as his head swivels to face the younger man. Hearing Dick says those words so plainly, so  _abruptly,_ effectively making the fact of Bruce’s actions earlier undeniable —  
  
But Bruce sees Dick’s full mouth curved up in a drowsy, contented grin, and he understands. It’s a little bloody from where Bruce had bitten down on it earlier. Hell, Dick’s entire neck is covered in dark red bruises, and as terrible as it is, Bruce can’t help the icy thrill of satisfied pleasure that shivers down his spine at the sight.  
  
Dick presses a kiss to Bruce’s chest, the movement causing clumps of damp hair to fall into his bright blue eyes again. “I still can’t feel my toes.”   
  
Bruce tenses, shoulders and mouth tightening, his free hand clenching a fistful of the sheepskin rug. “I’m — are you—”  
  
“I’m fine,” Dick interrupts, covering Bruce’s lips with two fingers. “More than fine, actually.” His grin widens. “Fantastic, even. You’re pretty alright, yourself,” he adds with a wink.  
  
It’s enough to choke a laugh out of Bruce. Knowing Dick is alright enough to make jokes, and seeing that smile on his face — it doesn’t feel completely safe, yet, and perhaps it never will. But it’s enough to let Bruce relax the smallest amount. To wrap two arms around his partner in a loose embrace and press a kiss to Dick’s mussed hair.   
  
Dick cozies up to him readily. “In your defense,” he adds, thumbing a feathery tattoo over Bruce’s mouth, “I was trying to get you to loosen up.”  
  
Bruce thinks back to just two hours earlier, when Dick had been lounging on the rug with his long limbs splayed everywhere. His thin white t-shirt must have been a size or two too small; certainly years old judging by the way it had stretched raggedly across Dick’s long torso. So tightly that even from the vantage point of his desk, Bruce could see the peaks of two taut nipples as Dick circled his fingers over them. And then those fingers had ghosted down that sculpted, muscled stomach with feather-light touches, nails scratching lightly along, before slowing to a pause just above the waistband of his jeans.   
  
Bruce had tried to return his focus to his paperwork. He  _had_ , really. But keeping his eyes fixed on R&D proposals, on spreadsheets of graphs and budget figures, rather than the sliver of bare skin exposed below Dick’s t-shirt, the teasing movement of those long, slender fingers…   
  
Well. It had been somewhat difficult.  
  
Not least when Dick’s hand continued skirting that edge, running lightly over his navel, rubbing over hipbones, never quite dipping lower.  
  
Twenty minutes on, Bruce had calmly suggested that Dick leave “ _if you are so restless, instead of being a disturbance_ ”. All the while surreptitiously adjusting his collar, the study air suddenly a suffocating heat over his throat and face.  
  
When Dick only scoffed and shifted so that his jeans rode down further, exposing the band of his black briefs, Bruce had vocalised a few strongly-worded comments to get Dick out of the room. Trying valiantly to hide the way he had begun shifting uncomfortably in his seat.   
  
The hang of his own pants were in sore need of an adjustment by the time he succumbed to barking out an order. For Dick to  _get out, boy_ , in a cadence so low and deep that it may as well have been Batman’s _;_  Bruce’s last defence against the roaring in his ears, and the blazing desire tightening every pore of his skin.  
  
Dick simply arched his back and neck in a stretch only an acrobat could manage, before glancing over at Bruce with a knowing grin. Before bending his body enough that Bruce could see Dick’s fingers lifting up the band of his pants and underwear, teasing at a glimpse of his flushed, hardening arousal.  
  
Bruce had heard his own breath hitch at the merest  _hint_  of it. Blood boiling in his veins as his brain filled in the remaining details: Dick’s exact… measurements, how hot he might be in Bruce’s palm, how thick on his tongue. The types of moans that would fall out of that shapely mouth when Bruce ran a thumb over the sensitive head of his shaft. How Bruce, twisting his fist around it, would have Dick's narrow hips stuttering in the most captivating way —  
  
And then he hadn’t been able to imagine any more; his vision too clouded over with a red haze of lust. That was his only justification, and a poor one at that, for slamming his palms on his desk as he got to his feet. For pinning Dick’s body immobile on the floor with the strength of his own, growling all the while like a rabid animal. For using one hand to bind both of Dick’s wrists, and his knees to keep those enticing thighs locked together. For licking and biting his way down the taut muscles of Dick’s stomach, hungrily laving at the dips and swells before taking Dick into his mouth and exploiting every trick he knew to make his lover moan and cry his name over and over.  
  
For  _fucking_  Dick’s thighs till they were ruddy and chafed, no control whatsoever as he groaned into Dick’s mouth and speared his aching cock between that wonderfully soft, warm flesh. For being so rough that Dick had dug his hands into Bruce’s arms deep enough to draw blood, breathlessly gasping Bruce’s name or some incoherent semblance of it; thrusting so hard that Dick had come a second time, the clenching of his entire body provoking Bruce to follow soon after with a low bellow that had to have carried into the hallway.  
  
Bruce breathes out at the memory of it, a long puff of air blowing out right from his lungs. As he draws in a matching gasp, he takes in the scent of the study: a mingled, head-spinning mixture of sex and sweat that clashes with the room’s sandalwood incense.  
  
“Bruce?”   
  
Dick shifts, so that they’re face to face, bodies still entwined. This close, he can see that Dick’s pupils are still blown, darkening his otherwise pale blue eyes. His unblemished face, with its perfect lines and high cheekbones, is tinged crimson and covered in a sheen of perspiration that Bruce finds himself tempted to lick away.  
  
That he would still want to, despite having already taken and taken and  _taken_  from this beautiful, incredible man, is terrifying. After years of repressing his emotions, and almost as long slowly trying to understand them — Dick waiting the whole while, sometimes patiently and sometimes not — it worries Bruce that he still hasn’t found the limits of his passion and desire for Dick.   
  
There’s almost always an inevitable loss of control with these encounters; territory that terrifies Bruce for the mere fact that he doesn’t trust himself around Dick. He doesn’t trust that he won’t return to his senses one day to find the other man limp beneath him, bruised and bloodied and  _used_  beyond recognition.   
  
It’s not like he hasn’t been violent towards his younger partner before, even if Bruce would prefer to forget those occasions entirely. Those fits of insanity that he always regrets afterward, that he never knows quite how to apologise for, because that would mean acknowledging the darker parts of him that very, very few people have ever been privy to.  
  
(Dick, Clark, Alfred. Perhaps it is not coincidental that they, out of everyone else, have had to put up with Bruce at his very worst. Certainly, they are the only ones who have stuck with him despite that.)  
  
The fear frightens him more than most things — more than the prospect of not being able to help people as Batman any more, more than the thought of Gotham plummeting irreversibly into darkness, and as much as the potential loss of any of his family.  
  
There’s nothing —  
  
“Bruce.”   
  
He glances up to find Dick looking down at him, propped up on one elbow. Bruce can’t keep his eyes from wandering down the length of Dick’s still-flushed body, mapping out all of the scars scattered over the familiar curves of muscles. Right down to his shapely calves.  
  
Resting a hand on the small of Dick’s back, Bruce traces a gentle circle over the bare skin there. A fine dusting of hairs goose-pimples beneath his fingertips, fanning out into a light shiver that ripples throughout Dick’s naked body. It takes a while for Bruce’s eyes return upwards. When they do, it’s to the sight of Dick biting down on his plump bottom lip, eyelids flickering.  
  
“Talk to me, B,” he says huskily, pressing a palm to Bruce’s cheek. His gaze is hooded, long lashes fluttering under a dark, lidded gaze. There’s something there now, in his tone and stare, that wasn’t before. Something that makes Bruce’s chest twist up in knots. “What’s going on in that head of yours?”  
  
Bruce takes a moment to contemplate his answer.   
  
Brucie Wayne, playboy billionaire, is good with words. Batman doesn’t have need of them. And Bruce —  
  
Can’t make sense of them most of the time, and certainly never when Dick is involved.  
  
In the quiet hum of the study, the images and impulses running through his mind are overwhelming: the desire to keep Dick close and hold him tight, to never let go; to carry him up to their bedroom and make love to him for hours and hours on end. To take him out and enjoy the simple pleasures in life that he had never before appreciated, like picnics in the park or dinner under the stars; to go out flying as Batman and Nightwing and work together as a team once more, always dynamic and constant in their synergy —  
  
Where does he even  _start_  in expressing any of it?   
  
Behind Dick, moonlight streams through the study’s large bay window. The silver light forms a mild halo around his crown of wavy, raven hair, and Bruce glides his fingers over the knots of Dick’s spine, up to the back of his neck. Stopping to thread through the matted locks there. Trying, perhaps, to see if he could catch a little of that moon-kissed beauty.  
  
“I…” he tries, for all of a second. Before cutting off to cover Dick’s mouth with his own. He keeps it gentle; tender brushes of lips and tongue nothing like the dizzying, biting kisses they shared just minutes before. It’s both a stall for time, and a way to express himself without words.   
  
He’s never been good at this sort of thing, anyway, but something about Dick always leaves him particularly off-balance.  
  
Even as a child, Dick had been easy to get along with. Their friendship and partnership had been effortless for Bruce in a way it had never been before, or since. Then puberty had set in, pulling Dick into adolescence and adulthood, and throwing everything out of focus. Bruce had found himself trying to reconcile his laughing, bouncing, clingy boy with the strong, handsome, still-laughing man who had replaced him seemingly overnight. The charismatic man who flashed smiles that fired up Bruce’s nerves, who threw graceful kicks that filled his stomach with acute flutters, whose pliant body and deep voice haunted Bruce’s dreams and had him waking up hard and aching and desperately  _wanting._  
  
Off-balance, but Bruce has come to realise it isn’t a bad thing. They are still a seamless crime-fighting duo, they still know each other best (with the exception of Alfred, perhaps, though Alfred is always an exception). It’s a contradiction, yet Bruce find that he doesn’t actually mind it much.  
  
When their kiss eventually breaks, he rests his forehead on Dick’s, keeping their mouths barely a touch apart. “Thank you,” he says quietly. “For not giving up on me.”  
  
It’s not what he wants to say ( _I want you — you make me insane — I worry about you — no one else can touch you — I need you — I want to throw you on my bed and fuck you till you’re sore and hoarse and **marked** — I love you_), but Dick shudders against him, gasping oxygen from their mingled breaths, and Bruce thinks maybe his lover understands, after all. He always has, is the only one who ever did.  
  
“I won’t ever give up on you,” Dick murmurs, hugging him tightly. He presses a kiss to Bruce’s temple, and pulls back just enough so that Bruce can see the slight smile on his lips. “Now just shut up and enjoy the afterglow, okay? For once.”  
  
Bruce returns the smile and the hug, and they lapse into a companionable, quiet embrace. There’s not much time left before they need to head out for patrol, but with Dick warm and languid in his arms, he finds that it’s not difficult at all to do as he’s been told.


End file.
